[sigcomm] considerations for reviewing extended papers

[Joe Touch]

Fred Douglis wrote:
> Vern,
> 
> I agree that this is indeed a contentious issue, and one with which many
> conferences struggle, with or without a formal policy in place.
> 
> Also, your proposal to treat workshops like TRs suggests that everyone has
> some uniform view of TRs.  I was assuming you basically ignore TRs when
> considering originality... right?  I think that was more implicit than
> explicit in your description, but maybe I missed it.
> 
> I come down on the side of the current SIGCOMM PC chairs, I guess.  I
> think a workshop paper is to a conference paper as a conference paper is
> to a journal paper.  Most journals won't republish a conference paper
> verbatim, but expect some increment, which seems to vary depending on the
> journal.  

A slightly different variant occurs when a number of workshop papers is
integrated; in that case, the contribution of the conference paper is to
put all the work in a single context. The question is whether
substantial new work needs to occur for that submission to be
considered, and whether it is the total of the work or just the new
contribution that is measured.

There is also the challenge of how to cite ones own work in a
double-blind* review process (*- though the review process is oddly
inverted here, where authors are anonymous during submission but reviews
are sometimes published with attribution afterwards, but that's another
issue). I.e., this problem is amplified by blind authorship.

> I certainly think that if an author publishes at HotNets, say,
> and then sends something to the annual SIGCOMM conference that is not a
> "significant" improvement over the HotNets paper, then it should without
> question be rejected.

The ACM and IEEE require augmentation to publish work again. The issue
is whether the augmentation needs to differentiate the submission -- the
ACM and IEEE minimum requirement, which goes beyond wordsmithing but
measures the contribution of the work as a whole -- or sufficient _on
its own_ to warrant inclusion (which seems to have been the test by a
few PCs recently).

Joe